Friday, August 14, 2009

I love Amazon.ca. Click click click and your books are delivered to your door within a week. Delivery is free, the selection is pretty good and browsing is easy.

I picked up a few books with my birthday money. Three books for three hobbies.

Mastering the Art of French Cooking is a classic. It translated and delivered regular french cooking to North America. Recipes range from simple (Sauce Béchamel, white Sauce) to the complex (Coquelets sur Canapés, Roast Squab Chickens with chicken liver canapes and mushrooms). Butter, cream and wine are featured prominently in many of the recipes. I'm either going to have to take it easy on them or increase my meager (read: non-existent) exercise routine.

Light: Science and Magic is the definitive beginners guide to light with respect to photography. It has real world examples of lighting scenarios and enough theory to let you apply the scenarios to situations not covered in the book. How do you avoid glace when photographing people with glasses? How do you photograph shiny objects? How does the size of the light source affect the photography? All this and more await!

Working with Handplanes will hopefully help me achieve more success with my wood working projects then I am currently experiencing. Handplanes are mysterious creatures; when they work well, you feel like you can do anything. When they don't you feel you can do nothing. I'm hoping to move from the latter to the former.